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I recently watched “Crazy Rich Asians” for the second time on an airplane headed for – where else? – Singapore. Watching a film on a small screen is different from seeing it in a theater because your nose is in it.

Once again I was impressed at how American the Chinese-American Rachel was made to appear in contrast to her Chinese-Singaporean detractors. She is disarmingly casual while, with few exceptions, the Singaporeans are stiffly formal, and she is charmingly self-deprecating while they raise self-importance to skyscraping heights.

Early on, Rachel attempts to establish her Chinese chops by saying, “I’m so Chinese, I’m an econ professor and I’m lactose intolerant.” Economics is an acceptable professional pursuit in the financial capital of Southeast Asia but Rachel is a professor of game theory, which to Singaporeans seems a trivial pursuit.

Twenty minutes into the film, Rachel’s boyfriend Nicholas Young discusses his relationship with Rachel for the first time, face-to-face with his imperious mother. Singapore’s most eligible bachelor proffers his New York girlfriend’s suitability by noting how auspicious it is “that the first girl I bring home is a Chinese professor.” His mother, the fearsome matriarch Eleanor Young, quickly corrects him: “A Chinese American professor.”

In a face-to-face with Rachel, Eleanor pointedly tells her that following a personal passion is O.K. for Americans but Singaporeans put age-old family obligations above personal pleasure.

Eleanor again derides the frivolity of the American soul during the mahjong smackdown (where Rachel’s knowledge of game theory ultimately trumps Eleanor’s traditional Chinese mahjong strategy). Intent on busting up the relationship, Eleanor plays her anti-Rachel hand bluntly, telling her: “There is a Hokkien phrase kaki lang. It means: our own kind of people, and you’re not our own kind.’” Elaborating, Eleanor says: “You’re a foreigner – American – and all Americans think about is their own happiness.”

Plucky Rachel challenges her adversary: “Don’t you want Nick to be happy?” Happiness, Eleanor retorts, is an illusion. Her family’s enormous wealth “did not just happen,” she says. “We understand how to build things that last.”

Many Singaporeans did not like CRA. While the film portrayed the litterless, chewing-gum-less city-state as a gleaming super-modern, super-green metropolis in breathtaking Hawaii Five-O-style videography, it did nothing to show the multicultural aspects of the Lion City. The only non-Chinese who stand out in the two-hour film are the Sikh guards who confront the car bringing Rachel to the Youngs’ eye-popping mansion (shot on location in Malaysia).

However, other Singaporeans got a chuckle out of the cinematic skewering of traditional upper-crust Chinese families. My Singaporean friend who was raised in a traditional Chinese family said she knew old-fashioned families like those surrounding the Youngs. In fact, her own mother demanded that she and all her siblings contribute 50-percent of their salary to the family. She confessed that, one year, when her employer gave her a huge end-of-the-year bonus, she failed to declare the full amount for tithing by her Mum.

Not all Chinese Singaporeans are as tightly bound by tradition as Eleanor Young.

There’s a story behind Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 screen adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1955 novel. It’s a story with political overtones and it’s not entirely clear what role politics played when Mankiewicz surgically depoliticized the novel. At the center of the artistic intervention intrigue is Edward Lansdale, the real-life Air Force major general and C.I.A. operative most prominently associated with American military and espionage intervention in Southeast Asia. Greene denies modeling the quiet American Alden Pyle on Lansdale; but both the real Lansdale and the fictional Pyle walked a small black dog on the streets of Saigon in 1952, when Greene himself served as a foreign correspondent. Both Lansdale and Pyle had a consuming interest in keeping Southeast Asia free of Communism at all costs.

Director Mankiewicz met Lansdale in Saigon and it’s known that Lansdale advised the filmmaker when he was adapting Greene’s novel for the screen, boldly flipping an essentially anti-American novel into a pro-American film. In the transformation process, the novel’s Alden Pyle lost his name (He was simply called The American in the film.) Pyle not only lost his name; he lost his savvy East Coast upbringing, his Ivy League education and his job as economic adviser (cum C.I.A. agent) in the U.S. mission.

Portrayed by the World War II hero Audie Murphy, The American of the film is a Texan who works for a foundation. He’s more of a Gomer Pyle than an Alden Pyle: a do-gooder who says ” Oh, golly.” It seems his main occupation in Saigon is to make Phuong more American. Moviegoers may wonder if the Boy Scout was secretly a cowboy James Bond but there’s no way of knowing. Curious minds also want to know if Mankiewicz defanged his movie for political purposes, or merely to sell tickets?

The 2002 version of the film astutely casts Michael Caine in the role of Thomas Fowler although there were fewer accolades for the casting of Brendan Fraser as Alden Pyle (Pyle gets his name back). Caine was nominated for Best Actor in the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and BAFTA.

Critics agreed that the 2002 film was better written — without help from the C.I.A., — and better directed by the Australian Philip Noyce, who closely follows Graham Greene’s celebrated story line.

The peripatetic world-traveler Paul Theroux has observed that in the world’s oldest and greatest port cities, brothels were always conveniently located. In Singapore, Southeast Asia’s premier port, a classic Asian massage parlor and brothel might be tucked away in a tiled-roof suburban mansion.

Jack Flowers, the back-alley pimp and shore-to-ship procurer, notes that Singapore in the 1960s was very old, “not in years but in attitude.” Unlike other world ports teeming with sexually famished seamen, “the completely Chinese flavor of vice in Singapore made it attractive to a curious outsider, at the same time removing him from guilt and doubt, for its queer differences made it a respectable diversion…”

In the early 1970s, America was pulling out of Vietnam (pun intended) while at home Americans were engrossed in a sexual awakening that produced a proliferation of sexually explicit men’s magazines, women’s literature, and socially accepted pornographic movies.

Published in 1973, Saint Jack gave readers around the world an insider’s look into Asian prostitution. The book and the 1979 film directed by Peter Bogdanovich provided far more revealing glimpses than “The World of Suzie Wong,” the 1960 film directed by Richard Quine.

Theroux’s descriptions can be visceral, as when he describes a room reserved for commercial trysts: “As in all brothel rooms, a carnal aroma hung in the air, as fundamental as sweat, the exposed odor from the body’s most private seams.”

Jack Flowers’ debut in debauchery begins in 1959, the same year Harry Lee becomes prime minister of Singapore in all its squalor. In Flowers’ view, prostitutes enlivened the port city. “…(N)oiseless and glittering and narrow as snakes, they looked like anyone’s idea of the Asian concubine.” The look was a mask depicting the client’s sexual ideal” just as white shoes marked Flowers as a pimp. He suggests that colorful silk dresses gave cold quick girls “an accidental allure, titillating by flouncy mystification…”

Other men sold ordinary souvenirs, Flowers sold what he called “the ultimate souvenir – the experience, in the flesh, of fantasy.” Flowers never stated a price for his introduction service but he was not, he said, a pimp with a heart of gold. As a sideline of his sideline, he sold pornographic photos and decks of cards from his back pocket.

Flowers says the girls he peddled were “practical and businesslike, obsessed with their health… and they treated their tasks as if they were a medical treatment or minor surgery.” “Many of the girls were modest in a conventional way, which even as a pretense, was compellingly sexy in a whore.” Their friend and protector would never say they were kindly and cheerful but he praised them, saying “they understood their cues and were dependable” as well as obedient and useful. “They believed in ghosts and had a horror of hair and kissing and stinks and dirt, and complained we smelled like cheese.”

“Some didn’t feel a thing, but just lay there, sacrificed and spread, and might say, ‘You are finished, yes?’ before a feller had hardly started.” Most did their job convincingly without having the slightest interest in it, he says. Indeed they had “the genius for being remote at the time of greatest intimacy.” They could be sensationally foul-mouthed in English, but spoke softly in polite Chinese among themselves.

Sharing inside information gleaned from running a wang-house, Flowers catalogues how American men differed from other customers: “The Chinese clients, of whom I had several, liked the big-boned Australian girls; Germans were fond of Tamils, and the English fellers liked anything young, but preferred their girls boyish and their women mannish. … The Americans liked clean sporty ones, to whom they would give nicknames, like ‘Skeezix’ and ‘Pussycat’ (the English made an effort to learn the girl’s real name). Americans, he says, “also went in for a lot of hugging in the taxi, smooching and kidding around, and sort of stumbling down the sidewalk, gripping the girl hard and saying ‘Aw, honey, whoddle ah do?'” When they leave town, Americans write letters back to their girls who can’t read them.

Flowers observes that Chinese customers plunged into it “with hare-like speed” and treated their visit to a cathouse as casually as one might pop out for a hamburger; Europeans considered the whorehouse experience as a kind of therapy. and Americans saw it as part of their education.

The year it came to power, the new People’s Action Party began raiding massage parlors, presaging the moralistic puritanical regime that would transform Singapore in a thousand ways. Hardly anything is left of Saint Jack’s Singapore. It’s a safe bet there aren’t any Americans pimping girls and selling pornography in the canyons of gleaming high-rise hotels and multinational headquarters. Singapore has the Internet now.

The movie Saint Jackdiffers in many ways from the book. It’s set in a present-day Singapore with a lingering cloak of its colonial past. The likable, easygoing Ben Gazzara stars as Jack, who’s now an Italian-American from Buffalo. Bogdanovich, the film’s director, cast himself as a latter-day version of the original Edwin Shuck. Theroux earned a co-writer credit for the screenplay. Roger Corman is credited as producer and Playboy‘s Hugh Hefner as executive producer. The movie was filmed in Singapore and banned in Singapore. Watch it online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxbfzGRVwiA

There’s a big new biography of Robin Williams, the always (it seemed) hilarious improv comedian, TV and film star who was sadly, a tortured soul. I’m not reviewing the well received book Robin by Dave Itzkoff, and I’m not recounting Williams’s meteoric rise from improvising TV’s Mork from Ork through two dozen Hollywood films including an Oscar win as Best Supporting Actor for “Good Will Hunting.”

Here at the Ugly American Book Club we are reminiscing about Williams’s star turn as Armed Forces Radio broadcaster Adrian Cronauer in the 1987 movie “Good Morning Vietnam.” Just stringing those three words together echoes the ebullient wake-up yell of Saigon’s most memorable morning disc jockey.

As New York Times film critic Vincent Canby observed, the Cronauer character’s irrepressible sunniness filled Saigon’s airwaves at a time when the reality of the escalating war in Vietnam was becoming increasingly grim. As portrayed by Williams, the disk jockey’s irreverent, iconoclastic, antiestablishment monologues proved to be a daily tonic for ordinary G.I.s ground down by military regulations.

Williams improvised a good deal of his disk jockey banter to the delight of director Levinson and screenwriter Mitch Markowitz. Markowitz himself apparently improvised the script “based loosely” on the real AFRN disk jockey. The result was nothing short of a tour de force performance by Williams.

The set-up of the plot is initially predictable. Airman Cronauer settles in at a U.S. Army radio station following a much cushier stint at a military base in Crete. Mindful that there’s a war on, Cronauer’s superior officers insist that the fast-talking, wisecracking Cronauer stick to the soothing music of Perry Como and Percy Faith. Knowing what G.I.s want, Cronauer crosses the line and launches a musical frontal assault against established military policy by throwing red meat rock’n’roll at his audience and serving up a potluck of potty-mouthed humor. His on-air vocal impressions of Nixon and Johnson, along with a cast of made-up on-air persona, mocked U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.

When his sidekick Ed Garlick takes him to a bar, Cronauer falls for Trinh, a Vietnamese woman in a white ao dai. Although fraternization with local women is taboo, the music-spinning miscreant buys a bicycle and follows Trinh to her English-language lesson. In an effort to impress her, he takes over the class and runs Vietnamese students through a gamut of English obscenities. When he invites Trinh to the movies on a date, her whole family chaperones her. Later when G.I.s in a bar harass her brother Tuan, Cronauer springs to his defense. An ensuing barfight lands Cronauer in hot water. To this point, our reckless the G.I. D.J. is a hero, at least to his buddies.

In 1965, Saigon’s cafes were soft targets for Viet Cong terrorists. One day Tuan comes to collect Cronauer from Jimmy Wah’s Bar. Moments after they leave together, the bar explodes, killing and wounding bar patrons and passersby on the street. Cronauer assists the rescue by carrying out the injured. But when he gets back to base and attempts to describe the terrorist bombing on the air, his Army bosses pull the plug on his report and sideline him from further broadcasts.

Cronauer is laying low at his girlfriend’s house when she breaks the news that any future relationship between them is impossible because of her family’s objections to a friendship with an American.

When Cronauer and Garlick drive to An Loc, about 60 miles north of Saigon, to do some interviews, their Jeep hits a landmine. They escape injury and flee into the jungle in Viet Cong-held territory. It is Trinh’s brother Tuan who finds them in the jungle. An Army helicopter locates them and brings them back to Saigon. When Cronauer threatens to quit, Garlick convinces him to stick with it, and when they are stuck in a traffic jam, G.I.s heading to battle recognize him, reinforcing for him the unique role he plays as an on-air cheerleader and morale-booster for the troops.

Cronauer is faced with another personal crisis when his C.O. informs him that Tuan is a Viet Cong operative. Cronauer finds it hard to believe because Tuan has saved his life on two occasions. When the American D.J.’s friendship with Tuan and other Vietnamese becomes an issue, he is ordered to leave Vietnam. He can’t leave without seeing Trinh, and though it may be treasonous, he feels it’s his duty to inform Tuan that U.S. Army counterterrorist agents are after him. So is Cronauer a hero or a chump?

When Cronauer confronts Tuan, the enemy agent, an amusing, thought-provoking movie starring a comedic genius is set for a tragic ending. But there’s comic relief when the screenwriter tosses in a good ol’ American baseball game where Cronauer gets to play with his “good Vietnamese” English students. His buddy Garlick also finds a way for Cronauer, who has been banned from the airwaves, to bid his radio audience farewell. Gooooodbye Viii-et-naaam!

My cable company offers the Starz Network for free. Even for free, I’d give Starz only 2 stars. The other day I watched “For the Boys,” a star vehicle for Bette Midler. The 1991 film was a red, white and blue flop that lacked sizzle despite musical numbers intended to let the Divine Miss M. dazzle.

Here she’s teamed up with James Caan in a cheesy script intended to pay homage to American entertainers who went on U.S.O. Tours to cheer up and cheer on U.S. troops. The tale traces the careers, friendship and enmity of the musical partners over 50 years, from World War II to Vietnam.

James Caan plays Eddie Sparks, an exceedingly charming fellow with limited song and dance skills in the mold of Bob Hope. Kids of my generation who saw a lot of Bob Hope on TV couldn’t understand why he was so popular with our parents’s generation. Bette Midler’s Dixie Leonard is a singer-comedienne who gets her big break when she’s paired with Eddie for a U.S.O. tour of North Africa, where Dixie’s husband serves as an Army combat photographer.

Right away we see that Eddie’s patriotic sacrifice in volunteering to entertain the troops is mostly a publicity campaign to advance his reputation as an altruistic American patriot. He’s married, with three young daughters, but lusts after Dixie and plays father to her fatherless son Danny.

Fast forward to 1969 when Eddie lures Dixie for another U.S.O. tour, this time in Vietnam, where Danny Leonard is an Army captain. Danny commands a firebase, a temporary encampment set up to provide artillery support. The word “firebase” portends an unfortunate end to the tour.

Eddie is his gung-ho self, blindly supporting U.S. policy in Southeast Asia with a kind of Make America the Greatest Generation Again ethos. “I can’t tell you how damn proud we are of what you’re doing here,” he tells an incredulous Capt. Leonard. “We’re gonna beat those little bastards, y’know,” he says. Expressing the futility of carrying on a conventional war against a jungle-based guerrilla army, Capt. Leonard retorts, “Yes, sir, soon as we find them,”

Later Leonard points out a sweet-looking G.I. from Chicago, and tells his mom: “He collects ears. Cuts them off dead bodies.” Cut-off ears is a common theme in Ugly American literature.

Their time in Vietnam shows the old hoofers that times have changed. Their audience consists of drug-addled draftees who don’t believe in their mission. They’re not like the polite, hopeful young American kids who volunteered to fight fascism fifty years earlier. The whole U.S.O. thing – intended to remind soldiers what they’re fighting for – essentially white American culture – is stale. When a blonde go-go dancer takes the stage to dance the frug for the boys, the grunts aren’t content to watch her moves; they move in and nearly devour her. When Dixie, now about sixty years old, appears on stage, a G.I. shouts, “Show us your tits, Mama.”

“For the Boys” might evoke a bit of nostalgia among eighty-somethings but Millennials will find it as outdated as Bob Hope.

The Ugly American directed by George Englund

Universal International, 1963

Moviegoers who flocked to the screen adaptation of The Ugly American in 1963 were familiar with the best-selling novel’s celebrated cause, calling out American diplomats and aid workers for their ineffectiveness in the face of Communist aggression. If they’d read the book, they were probably as pleasantly surprised as I was to find that screenwriter Stewart Stern had turned clunky journalistic chapters into an action movie that still had a bit of whistleblower’s outrage. Rather than overload filmgoers with background as Lederer and Burdick had done to armchair readers, director Arthur Hill skimped on details, leaving critics and many viewers in the dark about the politics behind the action.

Variety put it this way: “Some of the ambiguities, hypocrisies and perplexities of Cold War politics are observed, dramatized and, to a degree, analyzed in The Ugly American. It is a thought-provoking but uneven screen translation taken from, but not in a literal sense based upon, the popular novel by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick.”

After seeing the movie, Burdick wrote a newspaper column noting that the movie possessed “only the most passing resemblance” to his bestseller. But the professor conceded the movie was in many ways better than the book, crediting the filmmakers with doing a fine job of fleshing out the characters and creating drama without diluting the book’s political impact.

In his first post-“Mutiny on the Bounty” role, Marlon Brando stars as Ambassador Harrison MacWhite (rebranded from the original Gilbert MacWhite). Brando arrives in Sarkhan with a pencil-thin mustache, looking every bit as macho as Clark Gable. He’s no bumbling Lou Sears. He’s a savvy scholar who’s got wise-ass answers for everything, and in the movie version, he’s no newcomer to Sarkhan. Highjacking the backstory of another character in the source material, MacWhite was an O.S.S. officer who parachuted into Sarkhan during a secret mission in 1943. Back then he teamed up with a Sarkhanese named Deong to help liberate the country from Japanese occupation. Now as the new ambassador MacWhite wants to brush up on his Sarkhanese language skills and rekindle his friendship with Deong after a ten-year absence. As in the book, Deong has changed a lot since the Old Days. He is critical of American imperialism and spouts Communist ideology.

MacWhite is perceptive and well-meaning but blinded by naivete and stymied by pig-headedness. This keeps him from seeing and understanding what the Sarkhanese people really want and need. Homer Atkins is back, played by Pat Hingle, who later played the Commissioner in “Batman” movies. Living as he does in the boondocks, Atkins understands that the military highway MacWhite insists on completing is the wrong project at the wrong time.

When tensions explode in ugly, violent and realistically frightening riots, MacWhite begins to comprehend that America’s goals are not Sarkhan’s goals. He observes: “We can’t hope to win the Cold War unless we remember what we’re for, as well as what we’re against.”

Crazy Rich Asians (novel) by Kevin Kwan, 2013

Crazy Rich Asians (film) directed by Jon M. Chu, SK Global, 2018

I was no stranger to Singapore’s perks and quirks when I first heard of Kevin Kwan’s hilarious novel. I learned about the book from a friend who like me, had lived in Singapore in the 1980s and returned decades later to gawk at the Disneyesque additions to the island city-state.

In Singapore, I worked with 40 Singaporean journalists in a no-frills newsroom that resembled a factory floor. My coworkers were earnest, down-to-earth intellectuals, who slaved away at their desks while dreaming about getting away from Singapore on holiday. We had a couple of crazies in the newsroom but I doubt that any of my coworkers were crazy rich.

Author Kevin Kwan is an American citizen as well as a Singaporean. His engineer father relocated the family to Houston when he was a boy. Singapore apparently wants him back to serve the compulsory military service stint he has not served. Facing possible legal jeopardy, Kwan did not attend the Singapore premiere of the film.

Kwan’s first novel, Crazy Rich Asians, gives outsiders an amusingly encyclopedic insider’s look at the Republic of Singapore, a buckled-down single-party state smaller than New York City. While spinning a soap-opera love story, Kwan’s spot-on narrative tackles such topics as the richness of Singaporean cuisine, the challenge of adhering to ancient Chinese tradition in the 21st Century, and the fine art of cursing in surreptitiously spoken Chinese dialects.

At two hours’ running time, the movie can’t touch the book’s ability to serve up delicious detail about food and foibles, families and friendships.

CRA is primarily about Singaporeans, Americans are conspicuous by comparison. The movie’s rom-com plot hinges on whether a quintessentially American girl will be accepted by her Chinese Singaporean boyfriend’s ultra-rich social circle. Unlike Chinese Singaporeans, whose worldview is Confucian and class-conscious, the Chinese American interloper and potential wife (Oh my God!) embodies the openness and disdain for class distinction that most of the world admires in Americans.

Rachel Chu is no Ugly American. I believe the author and the film’s director made a conscious effort to show Rachel as a natural beauty, confident and capable in her own skin. Early on, she is dining in a cafe with her Singaporean boyfriend Nicholas Young in New York City. The two are casual, carefree and spontaneous. With eyes only for each other, the cool couple is unaware that gossip-hungry Singaporeans have spotted them in a cafe and outed them in social media posts. When Rachel agrees to join Nick at a wedding in Singapore, she has no idea that her boyfriend’s uppity family has been tipped off about their relationship, and no idea that they’re so unlike Nick. They’re frighteningly stiff, extremely formal and tightly culture-bound.

Inside the palatial villas of the Young Family, Rachel is a Cinderella surrounded by ugly stepsisters – her boyfriend’s cousins and friends -who are not ugly but outwardly gorgeous. A wag at a posh party observes that Rachel is the odd-woman out in that she hasn’t had plastic surgery. Among wealthy Asians, eye jobs and boob jobs are as common as BMWs and Benzes. In one scene at a bachelorette party on a private resort island, Rachel reveals how un-Singaporean she is when she’s reluctant to join the rich but opportunistic women invited by their host to scoop up designer clothes and accessories for free!

Commenting on NPR, the Malaysian Chinese author Tash Aw put it this way: “Rachel’s squeaky-clean naivete is a clever foil to the intricate workings of the high-glamour Asian set around her. Chinese on the outside but all-American on the inside, she allows us to see the myriad nuances of intra-Asian culture that the novel goes to great lengths to show.”

Rachel is an economics professor at NYU. By Singaporean standards, Economics is a perfectly respectable field of academia, except that trickster Kwan has made Rachel a teacher of Game Theory. Being a Professor of Game Theory strikes conservative Chinese as an inconsequential and very American calling. I checked the NYU Course Catalogue to see if there is such a course. Sure enough, Economics 309 Game Theory and Strategy is “an applied overview of game theoretical concepts that emphasizes their use in real-world situations.” Though Rachel is mocked for being an expert at Game Theory it pays off in one of the film’s most dramatic scenes when Rachel is pitted against Nick’s mother, the imperious Eleanor Young, in a culturally loaded game of mahjong. Played to perfection by Michelle Yeoh, a former Miss Malaysia and a Bond Girl, Eleanor is obsessed by ancestral lineage. She is not alone. Alll the snoops in her social circle want to know if Rachel is a scion of the Taiwanese Chus, the Malaysian Chus, or some other fabulously financially successful Chus. Eleanor is so desperate to learn the Chinese pedigree of her potential daughter-in-law, she hires a detective to trace Rachel’s Chinese roots.

Rachel is a luscious slice of apple pie as played by Constance Tianming Wu, an American comedic actress of Chinese descent who appeared in the ABC-TV series “Fresh Off The Boat.” Born in Richmond, Va., raised in the Bay Area and educated at Stanford, Wu is as American as chop suey and fortune cookies.

Rachel’s mother, the hard-working, self-made real estate saleswoman Kerry Chu, is played by Tan Kheng Hua, a Singapore-born actress who earned her American chops as a student at the University of Indiana. And while a Chinese Singaporean plays Rachel’s Chinese American mother, a Korean American plays her Singaporean best friend who has returned home to resume her crazy rich life. Singapore’s wackiest returnee from America is brought to life by Queens-born comedian and rapper Nora Lum (a.k.a Awkwafina), who was last seen in “Ocean’s 8.”

When the ancestry-obsessed Youngs learn the unhappy truth about Rachel’s lineage, a happy ending seems unlikely. Then again, “Crazy Rich Asians” is a romantic comedy about two kids who are crazy about each other, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer.

Both the writer and the film’s director are Singaporeans who choose to live in the United States for reasons that may be obvious to Singaporeans.

In case you’ve been living on a planet where there are no crazy rich Asians, be advised that there is now a Crazy Rich Asians trilogy.

Bosley Crowther, the film critic of The New York Times, spent half of his review raving about cinematic aspects of Hollywood’s celluloid take on the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein Broadway smash. (Filmed in Todd-AO! Stereophonic songs! Photographic magic that bathes musical numbers in “changing rainbow hues!”) But I’m not here to discuss production values. I’m here to comment on Americans behaving like Americans.

In this special case we’re situated on South Pacific islands that are admittedly outside my Southeast Asia target area.

I’m going to pass on the questionable often hilarious transgressions of Seabee Luther Billis and his swabbies. There’s a war on but they’re busy dealing in contraband tiki statues and boar tusks and doing double-duty on the chorus line in musical numbers.

Being a true romantic, I’ll focus on the two love stories. Each has a serious interracial subtext and in one, we find a female in the role of an Ugly American.

While serving in the Pacific theatre, the U.S. Navy nurse Nellie Forbush is doing something little ladies from Little Rock don’t normally do. She’s dating a dashing, grey-haired French planter who’s planted a few seeds in his day. Not only is Emile deBecque enchantingly French, he is the father of two children with a native woman. When deBecque reveals his demi French-Polynesian children to his fiancée, Nellie is charmed by the kids but shocked to think the man she loves previously lived with a dark-skinned woman. People back home did not cotton to interracial love affairs. In fact, Arkansas was one of 16 states where anti-miscegenation laws made interracial cohabitation a felony until the U.S. Supreme Court stuck down miscegenation laws in 1967. In a rage of confusion and prejudice, Nellie breaks off the engagement and resolves to wash that man right out of her hair.

Meanwhile the handsome young Marine Lieutenant Joseph Cable arrives on a dangerous mission. Awaiting deployment, Cable comes under the spell of a plus-sized, middle-aged, betel-chewing peddler of grass skirts and tropical paraphernalia. The monumental Bloody Mary hails from the mythical island Bali Hai but she’s Tonkinese. Let’s get our geography straight: Tonga is in the South Pacific but Tonkin is part of Vietnam. Bali is an island in Indonesia – in Southeast Asia not the South Pacific – but Bali Hai is a fictional Fantasy Island that’s supposed to be somewhere near Vanuatu. Now back to love.

Bloody Mary dreams of making a heavenly match between Cable and a guileless young Tonkinese girl named Liat, who turns out to be her daughter. The gorgeous young people fall instantly in love and on Bali Hai, there’s nothing to stop them from spending the night together. But in the strong glare of daylight, Cable confesses that he can never marry Liat. What would his family and friends say if he married a Vietnamese girl, with eyes oddly made and skin of a darker shade?

Ironically it is the spurned deBecque who confronts Cable over his prejudice. The more worldly man makes the U.S. Marine reach down into his own psyche and come out singing one of Richard Rodger’s most brilliant, biting songs, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”

“You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught”

Cable and deBecque join forces, taking up a position behind enemy lines to spy on the Japanese. The mission succeeds when a Japanese convoy is destroyed but the young Lieutenant Cable is yet another casualty of war.

As one love dies, the other is reborn. When the lovelorn Liat is overcome with grief, her pain stabs the heart of Nurse Nellie. When deBecque returns, the Arkansas native overcomes her prejudice and opens her heart to her enchanting beau and his biracial children.

I was over 50 when I saw this movie and that may be one of the reasons I hated it so much.

Even at 50, it’s easy to fantasize about finding some downtime on a gorgeous tropical beach with some uptime for sex on the beach with a gorgeous French partner. But it turns out that life on The Beach is no bed of roses even for the young and feckless. For these sons of beaches, it’s more about guns and doses.

To get to The Beach, we follow the exploits of a hedonistic English backpacker played by Los Angeles-born Leonardo diCaprio. DiCaprio was fresh off the boat (the SS Titanic) when Hollywood paid him $20 million to bring the antihero of English author Alex Garland’s 1996 novel to the big screen.

Quaintly the tale begins when the diCaprio chracter Richard the Backpacker comes upon a map believed to lead to a fabled lagoon on an island in Thailand that has yet to be ruined by tourists (Obviously a fable!). This map is not your usual Robert Louis Stevenson treasure map that leads to buried gold. This one leads to an ever-growing trove of green; all the marijuana you can smoke in several lifetimes. Wowee!

Richard joins untethered American surfers who seek unfettered freedom and unending highs on the island. Happily, the new arrivals are accepted into an international backpacker (nee hippie) community of Swedish and assorted stoners ruled by a self-empowered American woman.

History students will find the situation reminiscent of Western missionaries and self-interested traders claiming a God-given right to usurp Asian lands.

Unhappily for the backpackers there are hungry sharks in the blue lagoon, and before long, the clear water is red with blood. And that’s before the farangs do battle with Thai drug lords who are defending their own turf with real bullets. Inevitably, in this mess of a movie, the hedonistic Utopian island turns into a beachside Killing Fields with few lessons to be learned.

\In the end, Richard The Backpacker, like drifters and grifters before him, can’t escape from civilization. His presence on the idyllic island, like the snake in Eden, brings an end to the heavenly garden. It is his behavior that precipitates hatred and violence, toppling the casual social organization built by drug-idled squatters, dragging them down into the real world of deception, machine guns and murder. This serves as a reminder that Paradise is hard to find, even off the coast of Thailand.

In Brokedown Palace, we’re back in Thailand, with two more Americans seeking escape from what they know of Western Civilization. This time the drama involves two young women, fresh out of high school, who decide to spend their summer vacation in Thailand because it’s cheaper than Hawaii and way more exotic. They’re game for almost anything except telling their parents where they’re going.

In the Land of Smiles, it’s all smiles for the good-looking blonde Alice (Claire Danes) and the good-looking brunette Darlene (Kate Beckinsale) — until they are arrested as drug smugglers.

Of course, Alice and Darlene are not really drug smugglers. They’re typical American girls in the mold of Cyndi Lauper who just want to have fun. Leaving their roach-infested hostel, they pretend to be guests at a posh resort, ordering poolside cocktails that cost more than they have on hand. Mai bpen rai. No problem for our girls gone wild. A charming Australian software designer bails them out. Before long, he’s making Goo Goo Doll eyes at the ingenues, and offering to take them both on a jaunt to Hong Kong. Unlike the American girls on a lark, the charming Australian is a drug smuggler, and when the girls arrive for their flight to Hong Kong, they are the ones packing six kilos of heroin in their bags.

For the next 60 minutes of the film, there’s no smiling as the Americans are charged, interrogated and jailed in Thai-language proceedings they can’t understand. We see them as innocently unwitting smugglers, dumber than a mule. But the Thai court system sees them as guilty and sentences each to 33 years in a harsh women’s prison nicknamed Brokedown Palace.

The New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden hit it on the nail: “In Brokedown Palace, Claire Danes embodies an all-too believable, contemporary version of ‘The Ugly American.’” Rather than give the girls a pass for their naivete, Holden sees Alice as spoiled and selfish. He notes that in seeking her own instant gratification, she takes defiant pride in being compulsive and dishonest.=

Alice is the face of the new Ugly American. Unfortunately for the girls, teenaged petulance and tantrums may work in Bloomington but they don’t work in Bangkok. As Holden concludes in his review, being “a willfully ignorant ugly American abroad” can have serious consequences.

The efforts of Darlene’s blustery upper middle class Midwestern parents to free her are toothless. They try to get her out of her Asian jam with help — and very little of it — from a U.S. Embassy flunkey who seems more eager to please Thai officialdom than free Americans from prison. Finally we meet Henry “Hank the Yankee” Greene, a greedy Bangkok-based American lawyer played by Bill Pullman. Unscrupulous as he is, Greene rides to the rescue. Married to a Thai woman, he can work the corrupt Thai system better than Americans who don’t know the territory.

The story and prison of Brokedown Palace are fictional. To movie fans my age, the cautionary tale calls to mind another movie, “Midnight Express” about an American who did the crime and did some time, in real life, under intensely inhumane circumstances.

In 1970, Billy Hayes was a 23-year-old Marquette University student when he was arrested in Istanbul for attempting to leave Turkey with two kilos of hashish taped to his body. Hayes was initially sentenced to four years in prison for drug possession, only to learn he was to be charged with drug smuggling, which carried a life sentence. In 1972, Hayes was transferred to a psychiatric hospital he described as “a lunatic asylum.” He escaped from the hospital in 1975 and lived to tell the story in a 1977 autobiography.

The book was a powerful page-turner and the movie was a thriller of the first rank. The movie was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Best Film Editing. It won two Oscars, one for writer Oscar Stone for Best Adapted Screenplay and one for Giorgio Moroder for Best Original Score. The book and film are recommended for those who want to experience how ugly life can be for an American in a Turkish prison.

A footnote: I had just finished reading Midnight Express when I bumped into the actor Brad Davis who played Billy Hayes in the movie. We met at a Honolulu bar called Bully Hayes.

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Published 60 years ago, The Ugly American by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick remains paramount in the pantheon of novels about Americans bungling about in Southeast Asia. The book touched a nerve, and half a century later, its title remains a catch-phrase for incompetent and insensitive U.S. diplomats, arrogant entrepreneurs, and even travelers and tourists from the States who act badly abroad. Nearly all of the books and films discussed here are reflections on the Ugly American theme.

We’re focused on American characters, primarily fictional characters, mucking about in Southeast Asia during the Cold War, Vietnam War era and the new Millennium.

Spoiler alert: Many of the characters you’ll meet here are seriously flawed or downright evil, deserving of the appellation Ugly American. It seems that whenever America is striving to reclaim its dignity in the world, someone comes along to poison the reputation of good-natured, well intentioned Americans everywhere. President Trump, if you’re listening, pay attention.